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Arizona Anthropologist: Issue #14 (2001)

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The Arizona Anthropologist is a competitive high-quality annual
journal designed, reviewed and published by an editorial board of
graduate students in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Arizona. The open access archives are made available
as a collaboration between the
Arizona Anthropologist and the University of Arizona
Libraries.

Loftsdóttir, Kristín; University of Iceland(University of Arizona, Department of Anthropology, 2001)

In recent decades, various perspectives have emerged that draw attention to the construction of gender and gender inequalities. This discussion examines feminist perspectives in relation to development and development's effects on women in pastoral societies. The article compares the Women in Development (WID), eco-feminist and postmodernist approaches to development and seeks to understand what kind of criticism these theoretical orientations can offer on pastoral development projects. I focus especially on the effects of development on women's bargaining power within the household, using data from my own fieldwork in Niger and records from other pastoral societies. My discussion shows that while WID criticizes the pastoral development as being gender-biased and reducing women's bargaining power within the household, the ecofeminist and postmodernist perspectives would question the development practice itself and attempt to deconstruct the dimensions of power within the field of development.

This paper examines critically several key assumptions that have guided many archaeological interpretations of prehistoric mortuary assemblages. It is argued that more sophisticated models of mortuary deposition need to be incorporated into research that attempts to reconstruct community structure and other sociological variables from variation in grave assemblages. To illustrate this point, and to begin to build such models, a study of artifacts deposited in mortuary contexts was conducted by the author in a major urban center in Arizona in 1996. Several different behavioral pathways through which objects enter mortuary contexts are identified in this study, and some general material correlates for each are specified. This study also provides a vehicle for exploring preliminarily how, and to what extent, various forms of mortuary depostion are related to the social identities of the deceased. Finally, a synthetic model is developed which seeks to explain variation in mortuary deposition in terms of behavioral interactions between the living, on the one hand, and the deceased and various classes of material culture, on the other. It is hoped that the general models and material correlates developed through this study can be elaborated by prehistorians to bolster inferences drawn from specific mortuary populations and to explore previously-uncharted realms of mortuary behavior in the past.

It is widely recognized that the role of the physician has undergone dramatic changes in the last century changes which have serous implications for the patient-physician relationship. This is an ethnographic study examining how certain changes in the role and abilities of biomedical physicians have affected patient attitudes and expectations about end-of-life care. In-home interviews were conducted with eighteen persons age fifty-five and older, including a sample of Hemlock Society members. Results indicate a broad spectrum of end-of-life concerns including capacity, autonomy, pain, and burden to loved ones. Most participants reported a reluctance to begin a discussion of death or future deteriorating capacity with their physicians. Instead, when conversations about death were reported, they had been largely limited to the scenarios of catastrophic illness (e.g., hospitalization, ventilator, etc.) and the Living Will. While this discussion does not overlook the utility of the Living Will, it proposes that reliance on this document for preparing patients for end-of-life care is inadequate.

A 1994 article by Virginia Dominguez proposes that institutional practices of hyperprivileging minorities do not challenge, but instead reproduce structures of racialization in American society. Minority scholars benefitting from these practices are therefore complicit in the very processes that make them "Other." The classic Gramscian dichotomy of force and consent, however, is inadequate for understanding the complexity of Dominguez's thesis regarding the social construction of minority types. This paper offers an approach to understanding the more complex processes of hegemony that forestall an oversimplified conceptualization of "force" and "consent" by examining the ways in which relations of domination are experienced and negotiated daily by those in positions of subordination. An outline of the psychological implications of "diversity" are explored within a problematized framework of hegemony that highlights the non-homogenized nature of racial opposition to dominant discourses and ideologies. The paper moves beyond the social construction of minority types to explore the performative aspects of minority participation in racializing cultural practices. Minority strategies of acting "as if" point to the potential explanatory power of performance theory within the realm of hegemonic social formations.

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